Chapter Thirty-Five Sen
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Sen
The fields whipped past. Arrows sliced through woods.
Another body fell.
Sen urged his horse over the ridge.
He wouldn’t hesitate. He wouldn’t back down. Wouldn’t give them the proof they all expected: that he was no good, that he would never lead the Gensei in their war.
You want to be a Kijin? they’d asked, leering.
A ghost of the devil-gods?
No, he told himself. I already am.
I can do it.
I’ll show them all.
Rain spat against him, cold, hard with ice.
The night drew on.
They had been ambushed on the road to Oda.
An hour before, when the town came into view and Tokuon brought his retainers around, assailants in black loosed fire-arrows from the darkness, into the cavalcade, setting some of the supply carts alight.
Sowing chaos, the night-wolves unleashed another volley, then fled into the woods.
“After them!” Ohori screamed. But the Oda fields were a waste of reeds and purple-tinted grasses that grew taller than a man, so tall that those in front disappeared if they went past a few paces.
Sen couldn’t even see the tips of their bows.
He’d rallied his blood-guard, blades bristling in the air.
Run, he thought. Run and hide.
I’ll hunt you down. Every one of you who hurt my friends.
The whistle of arrows cut through the night like rain.
Another body fell and he continued past it.
They were deep in the woods, hunting down the remnants of the scouts that had attacked them.
Dressed all in black, they were almost impossible to see.
Most had already disappeared into the underbrush.
He saw nightmarish images of two killers on a wall, of arrows in the night, blood on his hands; the horror of his stewardmother as she fell. It’s happening again, he thought.
In the end, they came back empty-handed.
Tired and on edge, Sen found that in his absence a messenger had arrived from the capital, to speak to the Gisan lord with desperate news.
He hurried to the tents to find his cousin perched over his maps, beside a small, balding rider who had come in robes dark as dusk.
“Nioh has fled.”
That was what the messenger had said, wheezing for breath after racing through a day and a night on his dying horse. He hadn’t stopped, hadn’t even eaten, since he left the capital. “Seikiyo has started a coup.”
And now there was no more time. Ohori’s brother Daijin Kanesuke saw the apprehension on Sen’s face and gave a bleating laugh. “What?” Sen said, but felt the blood rush to his cheeks, and Daijin just stalked away.
No more time. No more moments to sit back and learn, no more opportunities to see how things were done, to practice. Now it must be done for real. Now, everything was real. Now, within days, or weeks at most, people would begin to die.
The Gensei muster had begun. The generals were coming.
Lord Tokuon Sei’i of the Gisan mountains stood before them all. Get up, he’d said. Get up.
Never let them see you cry.
Nioh was trying to go east, the messenger told them, across the Onji. Somewhere in the riverlands.
“The sisters are out there,” said Ohori.
“Where will he go?” Tokuon demanded.
The messenger couldn’t say. “He fled the capital to find you… After our separation, where he went, I can only guess…”
“We move into the riverlands,” suggested Daijin, who was Tokuon’s milk-brother and right-hand man. “He’ll be hiding – one of the temples or the barley towns near the border.”
“We’re still too far away, brother,” Ohori said. “Even at a forced march it will take two or three days to cross.”
Daijin made to argue, but his sister cut him off with a look. She was right. Tokuon just waved vaguely, angrily, and sat. He said nothing more.
“I’ll go.” Sen rose. “I’ll go with the outriders, find out where they are.”
Tokuon was firm. “No, you’ll stay here. You’re too valuable.”
“You want me to prove myself but you’re afraid to let me go?”
Daijin chuckled, face twisted in a smirk.
Sen whirled on him. “Something funny, lord?”
“You are,” Daijin said. “And you will call me by my title.”
“The Shiden,” Sen hissed, with irritation.
“Laugh now, brother.” Ohori stood hardly higher than her brother Daijin’s chest, but even he shrank back before her. “It’s still up to us to teach him.”
“I don’t teach country bumpkins,” Daijin snarled, after a moment. “The boy knows nothing.”
“Let me go,” Sen repeated.
Tokuon scowled, but Ohori’s eyes met his own.
“Saito.” She whistled to her bodyguard, the great, quiet warrior-monk even taller than Kanesuke. “Go with him.”
The big man gave a nod.
“The men don’t trust you,” Ohori said, as he saddled his horse with Saito and the others. Several retinues were coming up along the yard; here in the fertile valley-plains, Ohori told him, in the Oshi-Gensei homelands, the manor lords and stewards knew their family’s name.
“But they don’t know yours. To them, you are a child, an orphan. A no one. They know Asa’in was your father; for some of them, that makes a difference. For the others: they see you as a mark of shame. They see nothing but detritus, the remnants and the ruin of the Gensei war.”
Some of them had lost their fathers, Sen knew, their brothers and their sisters, or their sons.
“It will take some getting used to, Hoshiakari. It will take time.”
Time before they offered him respect.
Time before he earned it.
Warriors cared for nothing more than name. He’d known this his entire life. Losing face was sin. Reputation – how others held you, with respect, or admiration, or fear – that was where power lay.
Sen had never wanted power, but he’d always craved respect. He hadn’t thought he would be leading armies into battle, but now? Now time came, rushed toward him.
Now the winds had changed.
Sen led his riders through the marshlands to the west of the Sengen hills near the border to Yamano. The Musha’in had troops in Yamano and the Hermitage to the north; they’d received reports of a Keishi group moving to the southeast side of Awa Bay, heading west toward the rivers near the capital.
It’s Nioh, Tokuon had said. They’re trying to cut him off…
Racing through the ridge-roads between paddies and barley fields, Sen felt a twinge of remorse.
My teacher should be here, he thought. He could have helped us.
But thinking of Jobo meant thinking of Rui, and that was not something he could afford to do.
Not now. The night loomed around him, huge and dangerous, and he wished he had the guidance of his teacher once again. He knew what this was like.
He knew the war would come.
Soon they approached another hamlet at the northern end of the valley plains.
The mountains rose like jagged fists from the earth, and the fields on either side lay low and fallow.
They’d been flooded. Perhaps a last-ditch defense by local villagers, to keep the Keishi out.
They were here, somewhere. The mountain-wolves.
Akiyo’s night-killers. We ride, he thought, we ride into the downland and the woods, we’ll chase them to the hills.
Oda lay ahead, a small village where the Gensei once held power. Where the Jibashiri scouts were waiting, where Myorin and her sister Tsuna would give their reports. Where the muster would begin.
They will welcome us, Tokuon had told him. Those lords of the Kanden plains. Those farmers. They have no love for Keishi. They remember your father with pride. They will help.
What will the Keishi think about that? he’d asked.
Now he knew the answer:
The town before him was ablaze.
When they finally returned to the township they found that the barns and the town’s small temple had been set to the torch. “What are they doing,” he muttered, “burning the fields…”
It made no sense for the Keishi to harm this village; comprehension only dawned when Saito told him Oda was an estate owned by Ohori’s clan. The Keishi had done this to send a message. Sen cursed. “Start helping with the fires. Where’s Tokuon?”
“He’s at the temple,” Saito said. “They’re organizing a chain to carry water from the river. We should help him.”
“Ame’in!” Sen’s guard, a lean man named Hori Yataro, barreled over on his horse.
He was one of two men sent by his stewardbrother to protect him – the other was Ise Tadanobu, a quiet warrior whose father was once said to be the best swordsman in Kitano.
“Look!” To the right, in the opposite direction from the burning temple, a group of peasants had gathered by the paddies. “Why do they ignore the fires?”
A feeling of danger pricked at the back of Sen’s neck.
“Let’s find out.”
No one would talk with them. When he approached, asking for the local council, the townspeople merely looked away, staring at the ground, the deepness of the night.
Many withdrew. No one spoke. It took Saito ten minutes to learn that the chancellor had ordered the town to be given to Akiyo Musha’in, but the villagers rebelled, and a riot ensued.
Now no one would look them in the eye.
“What’s wrong with these people?” Sen could feel himself growing anxious in the face of their fear. This town, the whole place felt wrong: all he wanted was to give these people independence. Freedom, life, clean air away from the heavy crush of the Keishi.
Instead, they treated him and his blood-guard like an invading force. Like it was his fault this had come. Their fields flooded, slowly turning into muddy ice. Their homes burned. Their roads abandoned.
He called: “Who leads the village here?”
There was no answer.
What’s wrong with you? he wanted to shout. He wanted to make somebody answer. “Hey! I’m talking to you!” He grabbed one of the farmers: “What’s happened?”
The terrified peasant cried out, in the high accent of the central valleys, “They tole us not to, lord… they tole us…”
“Who?”